Matthew Kirkwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> ... and we already do it. But it protects the port number, not >> the data directory.
> If I understood him correctly, Marc was suggesting a further > domain socket inside the data directory. Right, and that would work because we would reference it as $PGDATA/.socket --- exact, one-to-one correspondence between data directory and interlock file. A TCP socket isn't going to have any such direct connection to the data directory. We could try to make such a connection (eg, pick a free port number at random, and record the number in a lockfile in $PGDATA). But that will suffer from a bunch of failure modes, starting with the same one that's been biting us for PID interlocking: after a system restart, someone else may hold the port number that we chose at random last time. Basically, the reason that we want this interlock is because we are going after five-nines kind of reliability. An interlock technology that's not itself five-nines reliable isn't going to make things better. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster